Can humans handle nuclear power?

March 23, 2011|By Tribune staff reporter

With the recent nuclear disaster in Japan, the question is again raised about if we should be using nuclear power. Is it safe enough? Should we stop building nuclear plants? Should we shut down the plants we have?

I personally think that it is theoretically possible to have safe nuclear power; that we have the technology to do it right if we choose to do so. But I don't think that humanity has the discipline to actually do what it takes to run nuclear plants safely. And for that reason I think we should at least stop building new plants and we should aggressively upgrade existing plants to a far higher safety standard.

The question is: How safe is safe enough? The answer is with nuclear power, you have to get to 100 percent. We can't be running plants that might someday require that major cities be abandoned for thousands of years. We can't have plants that can spew radiation into the food chain that everyone on the planet has to eat.

The problem today is that plant operators take safety shortcuts to save money. Safety inspectors are bribed, corrupt politicians want deregulation, standards are too weak and are not followed. As we saw in the Gulf oil spill, companies routinely ignore what they are supposed to do just to save a buck. But look at the costs in the long run. When safety is ignored, bad things happen. With nuclear, bad things can last thousands of years.

So even if plants can be designed to be safe, the real question is if humans can be trusted to not cut corners and actually do the things it will take to be safe. I don't think we are there yet. The Japanese meltdown is an example. They invented the word tsunami and they built a nuclear power plant on the ocean that wasn't tsunami-ready. They thought they were saving a buck but in the long run this will be the most expensive mistake Japan made since siding with the Germans in WWII.

We cannot continue to fool ourselves and merely choose to believe we can run nuclear power safely when we can't. We have to look at reality and put a halt to this until we know we can do it right. We haven't even yet figured out how to dispose of spent fuel rods safely. We should at least figure that out before moving forward with any more nuclear plants.